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NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE/SC), has released its first alerts documenting astronomical events spotted by the observatory. Rubin issued 800,000 alerts the night of 24 February. These alerts called scientists’ attention to new asteroids, exploding stars,
Refresh 2026-02-25T10:57:02.554Z Wednesday, Feb. 25: Moon in the bull’s horns (after dark) See the moon near Aldebaran on Feb. 25. (Image credit: Starry Night.) The waxing gibbous moon travels through the constellation Taurus, the bull, high in the southern sky tonight, posing between the bright stars Elnath (translation: “the butting one”) and Zeta Tauri, which
NASA hauled its Artemis II moon rocket off its seaside pad Wednesday for a slow trip back to a processing facility to track down and fix a helium pressurization problem that delayed launch of four astronauts on a flight around the moon from this month to at least April 1. A 6.6-million-pound Apollo-era crawler-transporter rolled
The Voyager 1 satellite is one of the fastest human-made objects, beating anything else made on Earth by a considerable margin – but it’s hard to put that speed into perspective. It’s also the most distant human-made object from our planet. At the time of writing, it is traveling through the galaxy around 15 billion miles
Researchers have finally determined the shape of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble that protects our Solar System from galactic radiation. Unlike previous models, this zone, generated by solar wind, is neither perfectly spherical nor oval, but adopts an unprecedented shape that resembles a “deflated crescent.” The heliosphere, an invisible shield that stretches far beyond the
Chinese astronauts have described what happened when they were nearly stranded in space last year after a suspected piece of space junk struck their return capsule. Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie, the crew of the ill-fated Shenzhou-20 mission, were preparing to leave China‘s Tiangong space station and return to Earth on Nov. 5,
Astronomers enjoy it when the universe throws a curveball, and this object does exactly that. Working in two teams, they have found the largest, most distant stash of water ever seen in the cosmos. APM 08279+5255 is a quasar – an active galaxy whose central supermassive black hole feeds on gas and releases huge amounts
In 1911, Australian geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor discovered the Blood Falls—an odd, blood-red flow of saltwater seeping out from the tip of East Antarctica. Researchers later confirmed the color came from iron oxide, although they weren’t quite sure how, or how the iron even got there. But a new proposal may finally bring closure to this
It’s always a fun day for the space nerds when a NASA team has new images to share from the James Webb Space Telescope. Today’s pair has brains on the brain, with a look at the fittingly named Exposed Cranium Nebula. More officially, this cloud of space dust and debris is known as Nebula PMR